The semester begins again

So classes start tomorrow. Finally. I have my preliminary schedule for the semester worked out and it currently includes the following classes:
Statistics (STAT 400)- I'm gonna see if this is actually going to be doable though, because the UIUC guy who approved it said it looked like there was a prereq I hadn't taken, so we'll see.
Orgo (CHEM 236)- also hoping this one is passable. I do have the benefits of having the script to the lecture because the professor sent it to me so I could get the course approved. Lucky me!
German Lit- for my minor requirement. Not sure which class I'm going to take yet, so I'm going to visit a couple of them first.
Organic Chem Lab- this apparently starts halfway through the semester. Unfortunately it meets Monday 9-5 and Tuesday 1-5 which is a lot of time. It also conflicts with Stat, so I'll have to see if Stat's worth it by that point.
Technical Elective?- Kristina and Tim, the two CivE's here, found a CivE class in English about transportation/traffic. I'm really hoping it will be approved as a 400 level class, in which case I could get 400 level technical elective for it.

Meanwhile, I got my Religion Sociology paper back. I got a 1,3 which is also what my Basic Sociology professor gave me, meaning the combined 4 hour class will transfer back as an A. Unfortunately linear did not go so well... The exam was actually more difficult than the first exam, coupled by the fact that none of the questions on it were even remotely similar to the first exam, and most I had not seen before, homework or otherwise. Anyway, running far away from that class this semester. It conflicts with other classes anyway.

As said, I spent Easter weekend in Austria. I went down Saturday morning and hung out. Sunday we took a day trip down to South Tirol (northern Alps of Italy), which is a really gorgeous location. We specifically went to the Kaltener See (Cold Lake) and spent a couple of hours hiking in the area amid blossoming apple orchards before
settling down for a picnic lunch on the lake. Then Monday we went over to my previous host aunt's house for the yearly Easter brunch.

The rest of the week (following the linear exam) was spent finishing up research. I've started analyzing the data and writing up my report. That will take a while. As classes start, I'll be working in the lab only a couple of days a week, probably for the next three weeks. Then I'll be down with research and just have to finish writing.

This previous Saturday, I did a day trip with the TUMi organization to Augsburg on Saturday. Augsburg is a pretty cool city, it turns out. We went to see the cathedral, which is huge and dates from 900 something. It's got a mix of styles because of this. It looks pretty Gothic on the inside but has a random attached room with a baroque style alter. It also (apparently) has the oldest stain glass windows in the world. Glad I thought to take a picture. The crypt is also pretty neat. Augsburg also has a neat Town Hall with the "golden hall" which is a very gold decorated room. The other big stop was the Fuggerei, which is the oldest social housing project in the world and a "city within a city". A rich trading family opened it up to house the poor. Each family gets a (tiny) 4 room(bath/kitchen/living/bed) 600 sq ft apartment. Rent has remained the same since it opened in the early 1500's- 88 euro cent per year. Yes, year. They do have to pay heating now though. Gates are also locked nightly at 10 pm. It's still managed by the same family and was rebuilt after the war as all but one of the houses were pretty much completely destroyed. It turns out Augsburg was a pretty important city pre-war time, and thus got very heavily bombed. Anyway, the city was cool. I liked it. I didn't like the trip back.

It was supposed to be a 45 minute train ride. We left at 5:06. I got home at 8:50. Why? Something happened on the tracks between Augsburg and Munich. I still do not know what as even though it closed the track down for several hours it didn't make it into the paper. So we had to stop and wait for a bus. Except the bus didn't come for 2 hours. We got off the train at 5:30 and got on the bus at 7:30. We finally got dropped off at the working section of the tracks again after 8, in time to catch the subway and be back home by 8:50. That made for a long day.

But anyway, classes tomorrow. This coming weekend I'm hoping to head out to Cologne and Heidelberg. A friend of a friend back at U of IL is studying in the Netherlands and has Spring Break and a EuroRail pass and wants to see a bit of Germany, so I'm meeting him in Cologne on Friday night and we're heading to Heidelberg on Saturday and then back to Munich. So that'll be the next update!

Here's some pictures of Augsburg!

Pictures: (in reverse order)
St. Maria's Church (the old one)
The Golden Hall
A strip of the Fuggerei
A really pretty residence we passed
A couple of other churches... the one in back (the big one) is the Catholic church and the small one in front is the Protestant one.